THE EMPTY CHAIR

The "Empty Chair"

With all of the talk about our government’s "overarching" enquiry, and the church's "committee" to look into child abuse I am often asked if I am involved? 

But if I was being considered to be part of any "enquiry"  regarding childhood abuse , I would really  have to ask myself WHY? 

Because I know that on past performance, these people  will never appoint anyone who is authentic, or  who cannot be manipulated or who will challenge their agenda, and  they DO always have an agenda! 

It seems that when there is a ‘problem’ and an organisation is forced into action, some bright spark somewhere says ‘Lets form a committee to talk about it’ and then the vying and jostling for positions on said committees begin. 

With these so called multi-disciplinary safeguarding think-tanks there is always an "agenda " and sadly and disgustingly very often the survivors get lost in the haze of pontificating, in-fighting, egotists who either know what they are doing or have been sucked into it because their damage is so great that they are unaware of how their strings are being pulled.

There are many problems with these so-called bodies and committees but the biggest one for me is that there is always someone else's "agenda"  – it may start out with good intentions but very rarely is the true reason for their creation the survivors in need of real authentic change in the way that they are provided for by society in terms of legal, health, psychological, demographic, social support etc. 

The survivors get lost again and the "agenda" remains the need to be ‘seen to be doing the right thing for Joe Public’.  Nothing ever really gets done but everyone comes away full of tea and biscuits and patting themselves on the back. 
On a more sinister note, the government, and especially the churches – whoever comes up with the idea – retains their "Bella Figura" and can churn out,when challenged,  the fact that they have been ‘in talks / dialogue / liaising/ in diplomatic discussions’ to ‘try to resolve the issues/foster greater understanding’etc. -Bullshit!

The puppeteers of these bodies never ask those individuals who will challenge their ultimate agenda; invitations will be tailored to suit the agenda.  

ANYBODY ‘invited’ to one of these bodies needs to ask themselves the following questions:-

1. What is the agenda?
2. What is the mission?
3. Who will benefit?
4. Can I truly work alongside the other invitees?
5. Do I genuinely believe that this body is a force for progress?
6. Do I genuinely believe that I can make a difference?
7. WHERE IS MY EGO IN THIS?

We are all for discussions, we are all for coming together and trying to ensure that the infrastructure surrounding the massive arena of childhood abuse is to the highest standards, the highest quality and that change is made swiftly and effectively.  We were knocked on occasion for going to the UN to speak about our experiences but the upshot of it is that we have seen a systematic increase in reporting about this issue and we at least had a hand in lifting the rock that our particular perpetrators have enjoyed living under for centuries.  That was our mission, and we did it despite having to be on show and vulnerable because we believe passionately in what we do.  

All bodies need to be made up of people who are prepared to challenge for the RIGHT REASONS – not just to be seen to be knowledgeable, clever, important, etc.  There needs to be fire in their bellies to want to change the lives of survivors everywhere.  

Peers, MPs, public personalities should ensure that they are not just being used as a masthead for the good ship ‘Lets Look Like We Are Doing Something’.  

And at every single meeting there should be an empty chair – always!  

That chair needs to  represent the single survivor who is relying on authenticity and congruent ethics from any such body/committee in a world that they perceive to be full of abusers, charlatans and manipulators.  We know that the machinations of governments/financial organisations etc. are complicated and require delicacy and diplomacy.  We understand  all of this - but in the field of childhood abuse -THERE CAN BE NO ROOM FOR FURTHER OFFENSES.

Silver Wedding anniversary!

Today is our Silver wedding anniversary! 25 years has just flown by.

What with the pope and his ridiculous PR stunt this week, and now our own government announcing an enquiry into institutional abuse, I should be writing my thoughts down on both, they are so important to me. 
And I will-But NOT today!!! 
I am not going to let this sleezy world of monsters, pedophiles and narcissists encroach on such a special celebration of love and loyalty, honour and commitment- they are worlds apart.
Because today I am celebrating finding my soulmate and being happy with him for 25 years! I know most people have their silver weddings a lot younger, but Gez and I didn’t get married until we were in our forties, I had wasted many years in  an abusive marriage and getting drunk! He getting drunk and avoiding getting married!

What can you say about a man who would take on me and six children?

What can you say about someone who lives for me, and I know would die for me?

About someone who got  me - with more baggage than London Airport ?

Who has listened to all of my terrible stories without turning a hair, who cried when he learned of all the clergy abuse.Who has accompanied me on many trips, and when he wasn’t able to, has stayed at home with the kettle on for my return.

Who paints me beautiful pictures,

Who has created a beautiful garden just for me,

Who cooks for me because he knows my difficulty with eating.

When I first met my husband, I was about eight years clean and sober, I was working at my first decent job, the kids were settled after a few very uncomfortable years being plagued by my ex husband’s irresponsibilities and nastiness.We had moved into a nice house I had learned to drive and everything was getting better.

Then I met Gez!

He asked  me out for a drink, and of course I don’t drink but I went anyway.

He kept asking why I didn’t drink, and at the time I didn’t think it was any of his business!

But eventually we were obviously getting emotionally involved, and it was clear that I had to talk to him about most of my past, my “baggage”

I sat him down one evening, I spat out to  him all the dirt, all the drinking, drugs,  eating stuff , pretty much everything. I thought "I don’t want this man to have any illusions about what he may be getting into".

He sat there for three hours  with a very stern face, listening to all that crap, and I was quite  sure he would run for  the nearest door when I had finished!

Bu eventually when I shut up, he just looked at me with a serious  face and after a few moments of silence he said :

“Thank FUCK for that I thought you were going to tell me you were gay!”

What a man! How lucky am I ? I wish everyone could feel as loved as I have since we met.

With all my damage, anxieties and history, my battles, fears and hyper vigilance, I am bloody sure I wouldn’t marry me!

So today the pope and his minions can go to hell! 
I am spending the day with the love of my life, and there is no room for those bastards-I will think about them tomorrow... Thank you Gez for 25 years I hope you can stand it for another 25!

EVEN MORE BULLSHIT!

I have just read the most ridiculous statement on one of my e mails - it reads "The vatican leads the way on  the fight against child abuse"

WTF!!!!

The vatican IS certainly in that fight, but is on the OTHER side!  They are being fought AGAINST!

This ludicrous statement  all hinges on the fact that they have LOUDLY announced the defrocking of the former papal nuncio Archbishop  Josef Wesolowski ,  former Vatican ambassador to the Dominican Republic , by a church inquisition board and who was stripped of his credentials as a priest. He has two months to appeal his conviction. 

Aren't they bloody clever? Aren't they bloody honourable? Aren't they showing how they feel about pedophiles?

Well NO THEY ARE NOT!!

They are simply behaving in their time honoured way of trying to take credit for something they have been FORCED to do!

This man and his flight to the vatican after last years revelations in the Dominican Republic were specific subjects of BOTH of the UN committees that we were involved in. 

On both occasions the representatives there waffled, evaded, LIED and refused to give up this criminal. They were pressed and pressed further and ultimately  when cornered, Sicaluni said "WHat do you expect us to do- we haven't got any prisons" Ha ha ha...... 

So what HAVE they done? ---- defrocked him! WTF ! WTF ! WTF!!!

And then, they have the sheer bloody gall to say they are "leading the fight against child abuse" 

This is INSULTING ,OFFENSIVE ,and downright UNTRUE! 

So as we gird ourselves for the next PR stunt when "victims" will be used and abused again in the vatican's pantomime in Rome, I would ask all thinking people on the planet to stop falling for their LIES!!!!

None of us who have been fighting this cause for decades have any desire to thwart any real progress towards justice, none of us have any vested interest in stopping abuse victims being properly valued in fact that is what we have been fighting for! 

But until you hear that good news  from one of us, I don't mean the handful of abuse victims who will naively be paraded in Rome, and are still catholic , and are being expoloited in the worst possible way,  but one of the hundreds of thousands of survivors who  would never consider being part of their game playing.... 

Then I can promise you what you hear is absolute BULLSHIT!

Don't tell me what to say!!

Today I heard yet another worrying  story from a survivor who has been very badly hurt by an organisation supposedly run by survivors for survivors. She had been told she could not say something. The person sounded quite heartbroken, and re-abused. 

I can really relate to her feelings, there is a common misunderstanding that ALL survivor organisations are good and wholesome and on the same page.

Not necessarily so. There may be some good ones, but in this world of survivors there are many occupants, all of them with a different angle , a different mission. There is a regular cottage industry having been created around this tragedy!

I don’t believe there is a "one fits all" approach, in fact I think having an organisation which dictates how a survivor should feel or what they say borders on the sort of dictates meted out by the church. Exactly the sort of bullying tactics that you would expect from a narcissistic regime. I don’t see the point of replacing one such judgmental institution for another! Just  a different kind of dis-empowerment.

It disturbs  me, it is something that I have indeed experienced. 

Despite being fairly high profile in my other work, when I first “came out” or “came in” to this world of clergy survivors I was pretty green!

I had been asked to take part in a mainstream TV documentary to protest the pope’s visit to the UK and the floodgates opened thereafter.

I blindly went on to various meetings and press conferences that week, which involved other survivor groups  unknown to me, because I was feeling that now I had “come out” as a survivor, it may help others to do the same.

My first experience was with an American group that had come over. They had somehow got hold of my phone number from the TV company and rang to introduce themselves. 

Great I thought,maybe some “kindred spirits”  but no - it was a phone call to tell me what I MUST do and what I SHOULD be saying and how I MUST be at this meeting or that event. I found it quite offensive and  extremely patronising.

The next experience was at a huge press conference where there were at least 45 countries represented and as many cameras. 

As I  walked into the hall, I was pounced on by a lady from the survivor world who I had not met but who had been on a radio debate at the same time as I, and so she felt ok to grab me slobber all over me. I recoiled, and she was offended, and I was acutely aware that despite calling herself an “expert”  she had no understanding of the need to be careful of the personal space of someone who has been seriously sexually abused.

Then there were other groups  at the press conference and there was a frenzied scrabble to get to the nearest camera, survivors pushing other survivors was quite an unpleasant spectacle.

The pope protest march came, and I was privileged to be asked to be the first speaker.As I have said many times before , I could have had no idea there would be twenty thousand people on that march!

After I had made my speech, shaking and overwhelmed, the organisers let me sit in the truck that was leading the march, and so I was driven around London very slowly at the head  of the protestors!

As we went passed a group of bystanders, some of whom were from a well know British  “survivors” group,  they couldn’t see me but I overheard a scathing comment wondering why I had been asked   to lead the march as there were others there who SHOULD have been chosen.

I was mortified, I  was hurt and I felt attacked again. I had answered a call to do my bit and I was so disillusioned, having believed that when I met other survivors I would automatically feel a kinship. 

I vowed that this would be the last occasion that I had anything to do with groups!

As I have said before, all of that changed when I went to Rome that October, I met survivors there that I felt immediate closeness to, Gary from the US just put his cheek next to mine, and Bernie also from Boston hugged me. My  deaf and speech impaired friends from Verona hugged me and it was all ok, they instinctively knew the boundaries and our shared pain. Tomasso put his arm around me and said “lets walk together” and Shelley had her arm in mine. Ton and I felt we had been brother and sister in another life, and Survivors Voice Europe was born.

Now we are nearly five years old, and I have had many more experiences in that time, some great and some bloody awful! But I am still as clear about the message of Survivors Voice Europe as I was then.

NONE of us have any right to tell another  survivor how they should feel, what they should say, how they should say it  or who they should join. We don’t need another Guru!

Each survivor has the right to be and say whatever they feel. We feel priveleged if they choose to say it to us.

We may be damaged or disturbed, we may not be articulate or even educated, but we all have one thing in common and that is we have SURVIVED the worst betrayal of body and trust.

We have many successes on a daily basis, we also have some royal fuck ups - but we are now becoming EMPOWERED. 

We wanted to offer a space  where survivors can at last be themselves, can say their truth without fear of judgment or embarrassment, can feel safe and connected to others, and can learn to care for themselves properly so they are stronger in their fight against injustice.

Even if every pedophile priest is prosecuted and jailed, even if all the colluding bishops are unfrocked, even if the pope resigns, hands over vast amounts of money,  and pigs start flying, we STILL  will have hundreds of thousands of betrayed and disaffected human beings . 

In the absence of the World catching up and realising that there are  hundreds of thousands of us, who may be in need some care, then we HAVE got do that  for ourselves!

What we don’t need is to feel vulnerable to abuse by those who SHOULD be celebrating our saved lives, instead of telling us how to live them.

Give me a call!

When we first began Survivors Voice Europe in Rome in 2010, we always knew that modern technology and communication was going to be very important to us. 
All of us survivors recognised that we all had felt extremely isolated, either geographically, or in the case of our wonderful deaf and speech impaired friends, by their disability.

Isolation is a tool that the church has relied upon for centuries, they are well aware of how isolated each one of us has felt and they would like to keep it that way!

Many of us were abused BECAUSE we were in some way isolated, just like the weakest of the wildebeest, singled out and vulnerable.

When we all met that first time in Rome, in the office of the Radicali party, none of us had any idea what to expect, I, for example, had gone along really on a whim, after being contacted by Gary and Bernie from the U.S.

The room was deathly quiet, none of us knew how to begin communicating, indeed we were all a bit wary of each other, because we didn't speak the same language and we didn't know who was a survivor and who not!

But gradually, as we found ways of translating and using sign language, something really amazing happened, and for me it was life changing.
We unlocked a prison gate that many of us had been trapped behind for years, and the words and the tears and the absolute knowledge of the  shared pain of our  abuses became a bond that will stay certainly with me forever. I met people I felt I had known and loved my whole life. I connected with Ton from Holland, who could easily have been my twin, separated at birth! (although I know he would tell you I am older!) 

David from the USA came and hugged me, and then Alda from Verona, Gianni,  Monika, Paola,  Davide from Senigallia , Tommaso from Rome, then everyone else!

I  had arrived, I was HOME! 

We   realised  that what had been denied to us,  that it is our CONNECTIONS that will make us strong!  

Since then we have stayed connected, and have connected with many many more, from Australia, from Hawaii, from Canada, Germany, Russia, Thailand,  and  from Poland and we grow and grow those connections almost daily.

I decided my role would be really to help empower survivors and help them in turn get strong, so I used my "day job" to spread tips and tricks to help people recover from this worst betrayal of body and trust.

I continue to give talks all over the country to tell everyone about all of my brave wonderful dignified survivor family and what we are doing.

I have been privileged that a few of them have been to stay here with me in England, and have spent some wonderful memorable times with them in Verona, Rome, Boston USA and Holland.

You keep me focused and YOU make me strong!

Of course the language and time differences can be a bit of a challenge! But we survivors are tenacious and adaptive and we always find a way! e mails, social networking, all make it easier for us to connect, and then there is SKYPE! this has meant that I can have wonderful face to face conversations with you from all over the World! A connection that none of us in our isolation would have believed possible.

So as we see the church continue to play their divisive and dirty games, we need  more than ever to stay connected.

Some of you aren't able to access SKYPE if that is the case please keep e mailing! 

For those that do, this is my SKYPE address;

suecox47

e mail:

sue.cox@survivorsvoice-europe.org.

Even if we don't speak each other's language we can give each other a smile and maybe blow a kiss!

I am usually at home on a Sunday so if you see me on line give me a call! We are so much stronger together!

TEARS FROM POLAND, AND ALL FINGERS POINT TO ROME!!!!

Today I got this message from Marysia in Poland.Survivors are really having a dreadful time there.The church showing it's true colours as usual. I don't know what we need to do next, but we have to do something.Their country  is steeped in that church's indoctrination and they are hell bent on destroying clergy abuse survivors further.We will send this latest information to the UN. 
These are such bullying tactics, but worse than that they show clearly that they have no regard at all for human beings, especially those they have already damaged.
We may all live in different countries, speak different languages, but for these pedophiles and their protectors , all roads lead very clearly to ROME 
In the mean time we send our love to our Polish friends and hope they can stay strong!
Poland: The church does not want the dialogue with the survivors

This year Polish Catholic Church is organising the first ,,congeneric" conference on clerical pedophilia among its ranks. The person responsible for the conference is Fr.Adam Zak who is also nominated for the position of coordinator for children and the youth of Polish episcopate. The problems is that survivors abused by priests to which the Church has contact data (because previously they reported their cases in particular curias) have neither been invited nor informed about this event.

What is more, the first and only Polish organization that helps those sexually abused by priests, "Do not be afraid" Foundation [Fundacja "Nie lękajcie się"] which was founded by survivors, was not invited either. To make matters worse, the Church refused to let the Foundation deliver a short speech during the conference. With regard to this issue, those interested themselves will not take part in the meeting. Let us someone explain what`s the point of that? Malicious people say ironically that the special guest will be the well known priest-pedophile, who will be an expert.

Unfortunately, the matter is not funny but rather upsetting. The victims of priests became aware of the event and are deeply appalled by the fact that no one event sent them a notice about the conference.

P.S. ''Do not be afraid" Foundation has sent official requests for a meeting to major hierarchs of the Church in Poland, but they all refused and referred the Foundation to Fr. Adam Zak. He, in turn, refused the survivors the participation in the conference under the pretext of lack of sufficiently deep relations between the victims and the Church. Let alone the fact that a person was raped by priest in the childhood, isn`t it a good reason? It turns out now that the victims are to grovel to the Church and beg for dialogue. But the Church should be down on bended knees to ask the victims for forgiveness.

Marysia Mucha, Monika Wróbel

Fundacja "Nie lękajcie się"/"Don't be afraid" Foundation

Thank you for all of the beautiful flowers!

I was 67 yesterday! Thankyou all for the lovely birthday  messages! 

I cannot believe I got to this age, although that is more about the mileage than the number of years! 

Sometimes when you think about sending a birthday wish to someone, you may not be sure it is welcome. or needed, or indeed seen! Is it just a throwaway gesture, a duty, or a piece of trivia?

 I can tell you that  for me those messages are more than incredible!

Because for an “alien “ like me, who spent so many years not wanting anyone to know my story or see me as I really am, keeping all those secrets hidden, and bumbling along  like Taurus in the china shop of life, never really belonging anywhere, it is amazing that the thing I wanted to keep a secret for so long is the very thing that has made me so many incredible friends!

 I had messages from all over the world! some from people I don't even know! That is the power of survivor connections, and indeed connections with other decent likeminded people, who,ironically,  I might never have known had I not started to talk about my abuses! 

 I still don’t relish  the idea that I am pretty much known because of being raped, or being a recovered addict! But I have to say, that the people I have met because of those facts are probably the most solid and amazing people in the world, and I may not ever have known them! 

The thing about shit is that it does make great manure! Having had a load of shit dumped on us we have a choice- we can either wallow in it and be miserable, or transform it into something wonderful.

So because of all that shit in my life, I now have a beautiful fragrant colourful garden of wonderful friends ! 

(Today was the first sunny day we have had for a while, so I spent a bit of it lying in a hammock in my garden and thinking about you all.Wishing you could all be here and enjoying it with me! )

XXX